Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

But still you grip to the coattails of life with the stubborn savagery that is your nature. Logic tells you that you should already be dead, that somehow the blade has missed the vital vessels. You have gotten away with too much to believe you will not get away with this, if you want it badly enough.

After all, by will and nerve you have survived exposure, excoriation, excommunication.

Someone will come.

A stranger, a Samaritan. Someone who doesn’t know you well enough to step over your body and move along through.

If he doesn’t come back to finish you first.

Only a fatalist would believe this is some random act of violence, but not knowing who scratches at the back of your mind. There have been too many likely candidates to narrow it down.

You are troubled that he did not speak. You expected the bitter spill of self-righteous self-pity. Of blame.

See what you made me do, old man.

Killing you without triumph is pointless.

But the face … you don’t remember the face. You are not good with the faces of men, although it’s different with the boys. Unformed and mobile, fresh. You have never forgotten one of your boys.

Your special boys.

It tore your heart out to have them taken away from you. To be taken away from them. But they underestimated the number, and few came forward to be counted.

They called it shame.

You call it love.

Maybe that is the reason you are lying here, bleeding out into a rain-drummed puddle smeared with oil, in an alley, in the dark, alone.

Maybe he loves you too much to see you with anyone else.

HE IS ON his knees when the cops come for him. They shuffle into the church snapping the rain from their topcoats, muting radio traffic, hats awkward between their fingers. Like they’ve seen too much to believe in the solace of this place. Like they’re embarrassed by their own lack of devotion.

For a moment panic clenches in him and he teeters on the cusp of relief and outright despair. He should have anticipated this.

He rises, crosses himself — a reflex of muscle memory — and turns to them with empty hands.

The cops don’t need to speak. Their faces speak for them. It is not the first time they have come for him like this. Not here. He doesn’t stop long enough to pull on a coat before they hustle him out, through the slanted rain to the black-and-white angled by the curb, lights still turning lazily.

The ride is short. The cops exchange muttered words in the front seat. He reads questions in their gaze reflected from glass and mirrors but has nothing to say. This is the place of his choosing, and they cannot understand the choice.

He stares out through the streaked side window at the passing night, at the tawdry glitz of hidden desperation.

The rain comes down with relentless fervor. Water begins to pile up in the gutters, flash-flooding debris toward the storm drains. If only sins were as easily swept clean away.

The car slews to a halt beside two others just outside the crime tape. The lights zigzag in and out of sync with more urgency than the men around them.

Hope plucks at him.

The cops step out; one opens his door. They lift the tape to duck inside the perimeter, though there is nobody to keep at bay. Violence is too common here to draw a crowd in this rain.

A detective intercepts them with a doubtful glance, hunched into the weather. He has a day’s tired stubble above his collar, and a tired suit beneath his overcoat.

“This him?”

One of the cops nods. “All yours.”

“Let’s go.” The detective steps back with a spread arm, an open invitation tinged with mocking — for what he is, for what he represents.

“Wallet was still in the vic’s hip pocket — how we knew he was one of yours,” the detective says as they walk toward the alley. “But we would have made him sooner or later.”

The detective waits for a response, for a simple curiosity that’s not forthcoming.

“I do what needs to be done.”

The detective shrugs. “Sure you do. For the sinners as much as the saints, huh?”

“That’s always been the way of it.”

“Sure.” The detective’s face bulges, bones pressing against his skin as if engorged. “This guy’s a convicted pederast. He fucks boys — kids. The younger the better. And he was a priest when they sent him down. A goddamn priest.”

“He’ll be judged.”

They reach the throat of the alley and the detective stops, as if to go farther will leave him open to contamination.

“Well, I’d say he’s had his earthly judgment.” And if the voice is ice, the eyes are fire. “All that’s left for him is the fucking divine.”

ADRIFT IN YOUR own circle of confusion, you catch only snatches of words you recognize but can no longer comprehend.

“… amazed he’s lasted this long …”

“… nothing more we can do …”

“… had it coming …”

And you’re colder than the sea, locked inside a faltering body and a breaking mind, locked into a tumult of regret and the terror of going to meet a vengeful Maker.

The medics rise, retreat, leaving the clutter of their futile effort strewn around you.

You want to cry for them not to leave you, not to let you die alone, but you lie muted by the blade, stilled by the approaching darkness. Darker than the alley, darker than the earth. The devil prowls the shadows, waiting without tolerance, watching with lascivious eyes. Soon he will engulf you, rip apart your body even as your last breath decays, and devour a soul already rotten.

Unless …

“… he’s here …”

Your eyes flutter closed.

Thank God.

It takes effort to open them again, to see the priest approaching. The medics have moved back a respectful distance, clustering with the detective at the mouth of the alley, superfluous. The priest bends over you.

You prepare yourself for Penance, Anointing, Viaticum. He’ll hear no spoken confession from your lips, but absolution assuming contrition surely must be granted.

You prepare yourself for a ritual worn with consoling familiarity. One you carried out often enough, back in a former life.

But as the priest bends low, you catch sight of his face, and this man’s face you do remember, from behind the blade all the way back to his boyhood.

He was a special boy, all right.

Your first temptation on the path of sin.

And now your last.

The fear writhes in you, but he touches your forehead with a gentle finger and when he speaks, his voice is gentle too.

“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace …”